Game dev #12: Minecraft Bedrock support
The latest major feature for the Creeper's Lab landed two days ago: full support for Bedrock players on all servers! This includes Windows 10 and mobile, plus consoles with some workarounds.
Then, new advertisements were posted last night to make people aware of this. The reception has been... interesting. Actual quotes:
- “Impossible”
- “That’s literally not how the game works”
- “yea that's literally not possible”
- “How is that possible”
There's some convincing to be done, but several others have tried it successfully already!
I take no credit for allowing Bedrock players to play on our Java servers, that goes to the talented team at Geyser. My efforts were focused on updating my code backend to properly support these new players, and I had plenty of challenges to face.
First and obvious, the whitelist. Java users get whitelisted by entering their player name on their forum profile, but Bedrock uses Xbox Live Gamertag accounts, with the identifier being a XUID instead of the usual Java UUID. Finding a way to fetch that information and properly update player accounts as they log in took some time. Behind the scenes, the flow is different, but from the players point of view it works the same.
Later came the player statistics. This might seem irrelevant, but player statistics are used for more than vanity purposes: they power a lot of systems, from the web profiles to the achievements, plus my internal activity tracking tools. This was relatively straightforward to do, only requiring time to adjust everything properly!
Finally, a key part was to allow players to be on both Java and Bedrock at the same time. Many people have both versions since the Windows 10 Edition used to be given away for free with Java Edition purchases, and it's reasonable to expect people to want to play on either account whenever. Until now, I had a strict 1:1 relationship between forum IDs and player UUIDs, and this couldn't be the case anymore. I've restructured data processing so that each person can have multiple player accounts attached to their names, solving this issue.
And here we are. The tech issues are mostly dealt with, now it's time to advertise and attract these new players that used to be out of reach!
– Doctacosa